Tactical Aircraft Maintenance

Oct 3
10:25

2016

Brian J White

Brian J White

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The Air Force employs hundreds of tactical aircraft to complete our missions, including fighters, strike-fighters attack planes and. It’s the responsibility of Tactical Aircraft Care specialists to ensure that every component of these high performance aircraft is kept to the most exacting standards.

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These pros ensure that the aircraft in their attention are prepared to fly at a second’s notice that pilots can safely and effectively complete their assignment.

Different shifts,Tactical Aircraft Maintenance Articles different tasks
Day shift recover, will launch jets out, and perhaps send them upwards again. Days won’t dabble into the maintainer side of things. Swing shift is where most care, tows, perhaps recovering a jet will be done. Mids will be tires and servicing struts: merely the routine stuff preparing the jets to go up for the next morning.

Obligation and daily duties
As you can imagine, keeping an aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars in tip top condition is a complicated process. Serious teamwork between airmen in several different Air Force Specialty Codes (AFSC) is essential to make it occur. In that group, the tactical aircraft maintainers are usually called “crew chiefs” because they’re generalists who organize the aircraft’s care and call in the specialists (likeavionics or propulsion technicians) when they find a problem.

Education
Day one in the Air Force starts, for everyone, with basic training at Lackland Air Force BaseTexas. Airmen contracted as crew chiefs stay on in Texas, at least initially, for practical school atSheppard Air Force Base.
It’s hard to say the length of time the remainder of a crew chief’s first schooling requires. Though that probably will not include training on a specific aircraft, this official fact sheet 404 from the Air Force claims first training at Sheppard continues close to three months.
The Air Force delegates where and how long a crew chief trains depends on which craft.
Those assigned to work on F16 fighter jets, for example, move on to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona to complete training. In a 2009 public affairs post, Captain Kimberly Hollenback — then commander of the training program at Luke — described an F-16 crew chief’s school as “four months at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, and one month at Luke,” where final training is made up of brief 20-day program, largely outside the classroom.

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